Invisible
by wscaster
Summary: As a child, Ianto had always wanted to be invisble, as an adult he'd finally succeeded.  But is it all that he'd expected?


He was invisible.

When he was a child, playing in the school yard with his friends they had always asked each other what super power they wished they had. He'd always answered the same. He'd wanted the ability to be invisible, he wanted to be able to sneak in to a room to watch what was going on without being seen, without being told to get out. He'd wanted to be invisible so that the could find out all the secrets that were hidden behind those closed doors.

Now he was a grown man, working for a living, and he'd gained the ability to be invisible.

Ok so he wasn't really invisible, he could be seen if people cared to look. But for all intents and purposes he was invisible. He had access to the secrets that most didn't even know existed, he walked freely through the rooms that were locked to most people, and was never told to get out.

But what he'd never expected was the hurt that being invisible brought with it. People would look through you, ignore you, take you for granted, and only say something when you didn't do what they had expected you to.

He'd still been at college when he'd been recruited by Torchwood. Young, scared and excited. He'd been sought out by these people to join them, to be let in on the secrets that the common person would never know about if they did their jobs correctly.

What a thrill he'd gotten when he'd started work. The action the adventure, the thrill of the chase, and the excitement of finding and understanding alien technology, of finding and catching aliens. No other job could give him that. He'd worked hard, had worked his way up the ladder, had gained a reputation for his sharp mind, his ability to organise operations, his ability to look after the archives of Torchwood One. He'd been given many opportunities to expand his talents and abilities, opportunities that he'd never have gotten anywhere else and he'd loved his job.

He'd also found love at Torchwood One. He'd met and fallen in love with Lisa. They had been great together, their friends joked that they had been the perfect couple. But they had had trouble, after all what relationship didn't. But they'd worked through it, and things had been going good, he'd been thinking about proposing to her, asking her to spend the rest of her life with him, maybe starting a family.

But then the Cybermen had arrived, they'd swept through Torchwood One, taking his friends and colleges and changing them into emotionless killers. He'd been out in the field when the invasion had been taking place, to far away to be able to make it back before the Doctor had been able to find a way of ending the threat. The Doctor who was Torchwood's number one enemy had been the only one who'd been able to save the Earth from the same fate as most of those at Torchwood One.

By the time that he'd made it back to Torchwood there was little that he'd been able to do. He'd helped with the clean up, while he'd looked for his friends, while he'd looked for Lisa, hoping that she'd been spared. He'd almost given up when he'd found the room that held three conversion units. It had somehow been spared from being sucked into the vortex with everything else. There had been a person in each of the units in various stages of conversion. He'd checked them, recognising one as someone from the administration team, he'd known her in passing, in the next unit was his best friend at Torchwood, they'd started on the same day, and had gotten closer of the time they had spent there, they had both been dead. He'd then moved on to the last unit, almost fearing who and what he'd find there. He'd been shocked when he saw that it was Lisa, partly covered with metal, strapped down in the unit. At first he thought that she was dead, he'd stood by her side, unable to move, unable to look away, and then she'd cried out, screamed for help and he'd been freed.

With her help he'd been able to convert some of the unit into a life support system for her, then he'd made his way down to the archives and borrowed some of the technology to help him get her out of there.

The clean up of Torchwood One had taken a couple of weeks, what with finding out who'd been there that day and who was now missing. Also there had been a lot of material and artefacts and prisoners to take care of, to move to the other branches of Torchwood. It had been generally agreed that Torchwood One would no longer be used, those who had worked there and had lived had been more than ok with that. The other branches had sent people to help with the clean up, and positions had been made available to the survivors.

He'd first met Captain Jack Harkness during the cleanup, he'd been intrigued by the man. There had been something about him that he hadn't been able to ignore, it had almost felt like he'd been drawn to Jack for some reason. It hadn't taken long for offers to roll in for him from other divisions of Torchwood, and he'd looked at each offer, researched them to see if they would be able to offer him what he'd really wanted, needed, and had turned each and every offer made to him down. He was beginning to despair of finding a position that would allow him to help Lisa, until he'd heard that Torchwood Three was looking for an admin person, someone to hold the fort, to look after the cover for the base, to do the clean up for the team based there. He'd known as soon as he'd heard about the position that it was the one that he wanted. He'd been way over qualified for it but he hadn't cared, the out of the way position, the fact that there was only four other people at the base, and the fact that most of the base was hidden underground with winding catacombs, and out of the way off shots that he could hide Lisa in, and the fact that he'd still have access to the technology and expertise that he'd need to help Lisa had been exactly what he'd wanted.

So he'd done his research, found out exactly what they wanted and presented himself to them as the perfect candidate. He'd also done his research on those who already worked there. Torchwood Three had been the smallest branch of the organisation, but it was also an important one. The team members had a reputation for being a little eccentric, brilliant, but eccentric, with each member of the team having their own speciality.

Toshiko Sato had been like him, recruited, but not while she was in college as he had been, she'd been working with a government think tank when she'd been noticed. She was a technological genius, with the ability to manipulate and understand advanced technology, this ability had proved to translate into alien technology as she'd proved when she'd started at Torchwood. Although she was highly intelligent she was also a quite almost shy person, who at times had trouble relating to people, she had taken refuge in the technology that she found so much easier to understand.

Doctor Owen Harper, genius in his field, was a qualified doctor who had loved the challenges that medicine had given him, the puzzles that diseases had thrown at him. But he'd found that he didn't necessarily like dealing with the patients themselves, and often found himself at odds with anyone in authority. He'd left the NHS behind when he'd been offered a job at Torchwood Three. He was cocky, often rude and self centred, but loyal to those he had earned it.

Susie Costello was second in command and another genius. She specialised in the alien artefacts that they recovered and helped to coordinate with other offices and the day to day running of their own branch. He'd had to dig to find out more information on her, she'd buried parts of her past deeply. But he'd been better and he'd found that though brilliant she also suffered as some geniuses did by being a little unbalanced. She had shown in her past, the past that she'd buried, that she had a tendency to become obsessed with what she was studying, that she would do just about anything to fully understand what she was studying. But as with a lot of geniuses, things tended to be overlooked, warning signs ignored until it was to late.

Then there was Captain Jack Harkness. He was a mystery. Ianto hadn't been able to find much on him at all, no birth records, no solid information. Even his Torchwood records were sealed so tight that Ianto hadn't been able to access all of them, and the little that he'd been able to get had only led to more questions. But Captain Jack Harkness had a reputation, there were stories about him all over Torchwood, some had sounded to far fetched to be true, but he'd learned long ago working at Torchwood, that no matter how far fetched something sounded, you could never be sure.

So he'd come to Torchwood Three, had snuck Lisa in and down into the lower levels without anyone catching him, and that was where he kept her. He'd taken care of all the grunt work that had fallen to him, made sure that the team always had food to eat, and refreshments when they needed them, cleaned up the hub, looked after the artefacts and did research for them when needed. But when he had a moment or when the others had left he'd go down to where he kept Lisa and take care of her. He did all he could to remove the implants from her, make her comfortable, but he was limited in what he could do, so he'd also spent time researching, and looking for someone to help him.

He'd found it ridiculously easy to keep Lisa hidden from the others. As time went on he realised that he'd finally gotten the special power that he'd always wanted as a child. He'd become invisible. No one he worked with saw him. He was simply background noise. He moved quietly, stepped in when needed to make sure things ran smoothly, cleaned up after them and watched as they eventually took him for granted, as they stopped taking notice of him as a person, for all they cared he could have been a robot, but it made it easier for him to look after Lisa.

At first he'd had to work hard to meld in to the background, he'd been formal, respectful to those he worked with, he'd kept a distance, gave everyone what they wanted, what they expected, only shared the minimum with them to keep them from asking to many questions or digging to deep into his past. He'd gone to great lengths to learn as much as he could about each of them, to find out how to act around them, learnt quickly how to keep his distance while seemingly letting them in.

He'd been there for around a year when he first realised that he'd succeeded in melting into the background. He'd been cleaning up the hub while the rest of the team were out chasing down another weevil, he'd listened in over the comm system as they worked and then caught the weevil, and had found himself heading off to the kitchen area to make them coffee for when they returned. It was when they returned that it had really hit him, they had returned and had strolled back in each automatically reaching for their coffee mug that was on the tray he held as he stood by the security gate. None of them had even looked at him as they passed, or even thanked him.

It had hit him hard. And at the same time he'd wondered how long a person could exist like that before they truly did start to disappear.

Would anyone even notice if he wasn't there?

Did they even know that he WAS there?

Or was he truly invisible?


End file.
